Pages

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

DMK Bumblebee WIP 3

Here's an update on the Bee kit I've been kit-bashing and modding. We're down to the limbs! Well...at least one side of it. I figured it saves a lot more time to work on one side of the kit first to get a general feel of the form, and then once that's settled, just replicate it on the other side. As you can see, I'm keeping the sinewy armoured look of the movie Bee, but splicing it with a G1 feel and taking away the robotic-ness of the movie design.

Let's start from the top. I've settled the shoulder armour, which was to beef it way up for a heroic look. Now we move down to the fore-arm. If you've seen the DMK kit, the fore-arm's pretty flimsy. I decided to give it a more solid look by fusing a part from the WFC toy, and then kit-bashing the joint hole where the WFC hands fit, to form the fore-arm-wrist segment as above.

This is the part I spliced from the WFC toy - that little shoulder bit there:

Next, we sand down Arcee's blade from the TF Prime toy series, to make it more menacing. A before-after sanding comparison:

Here, you can see what the original DMK movie fore-arm/ wrist looks like compared to my modded version. I didn't like the flimsy wired look. Those robo-fingers are not cutting it either. My Bee has to have an iron, Cybertronian grip before he slices you in half with those flanking blades. LOL:

With that done, we go to the nether regions...

I'm leaving the mid-section as it is - exposed as an inner frame - b'cos I like the small-waisted look. But I've gotta do something with the crotch-piece, so I cut and spliced spares from the original DMK armour that I won't be using. These parts come from the feet. Motive is to give a more solid feel to Bee's crotch, much like how Gundams all have crotch armour or skirting.

A side-view of the entire leg. I kept most of the parts intact. The only change here is to the feet, as I didn't like the original robo-look of the DMK movie feet....What I did was to cut off a protruding piece of the inner frame that kinda just juts out from the feet. I totally didn't dig that at all! And then I stuck on tyre from the WFC toy to give the feet a more weighted look, balance, and of course to make up the four-wheel count!

The top of the snipped off feet bit is sealed with some pla-plating. I moved a support stand at the back of the feet to the extreme side to do away with the original tripod look. Now at least the feet's looking more mecha-ish! Of course, the original DMK tyre at the ankle had to be removed, leaving only the rims.This bit will be disguised with the much bigger WFC tyre later.

That's all for now! This week's gonna be a crazy work week for me (what a way to start the new year huh?) so I'm not sure if I'll have any time to work on Bee. Fingers crossed! Till the next update!